Poor Tesco. Profits down 16%; £5bn wiped off the value of the company. A packet of cheese and some onions gone mysteriously AWOL from its Henley branch. Oh, how the heart bleeds for chief executive, Phil Clarke, who, after a shareholder rebellion in June last year, was forced to limit his pay packet to a maximum of just £6.9m this year.

For who can't feel a twinge of sympathy in their hearts for the lovable corporate behemoth? Apart from the nation's pig farmers who protested outside Tesco's AGM last year that the supermarket had squeezed them so much, they were now subsidising them to the tune of £10 a pig, perhaps? Or the whales and dolphins that Tesco's subsidiary company in Japan sells as a tasty snack? Or the nation's wind-blasted high streets empty bar the occasional piece of tumbleweed?

In fairness, Tesco is simply applying the logic of early 21st-century capitalism. This, as eagle-eyed viewers of The Apprentice know, works roughly like this: take any old crap and then charge as much as you can possibly get away with for it. Or ideally more. In this, the episode in which one of the teams was charged with making sandwiches and used tuna so cheap that it had the texture and appearance of cat food, causing unsuspecting diners across the City of London to gag and make vomiting noises, is quite instructive. They won. Alan Sugar congratulated them for their initiative and enterprise.

That's capitalism. Just as cutting open women and inserting exploding bags of industrial-grade silicone into their breasts, and charging them handsome sums of money for it, is too. As is sacking all your check-out staff and outsourcing the labour to your customers. Industrial-grade silicone is cheaper than medical grade, after all. And may not cause cancer. And having no staff at all and letting your customers flail helplessly with unauthorised items in the bagging area is significantly cheaper than having lots. So what if breasts explode and shoppers despair? It's simply called increasing your margins.

So who can blame Antony Worrall Thompson who was caught after self-scanning? That was all he was trying to do. The small technicality of the law aside, is there really so much difference? On one occasion, he said last week, he paid Tesco £180 for three cases of champagne and then stole £4 worth of goods. His margin, admittedly, was pathetic. It's the kind of derisory profit line that would make shareholders laugh and point. But it was just a margin, not the Great Train Robbery. Or the Royal Bank of Scotland's balance sheet.

Worrall Thompson broke the law. But in other circumstances, if he was, say, a limited company and Tesco was, for example, a single mother, from whom he'd successfully managed to make an extra 31p profit, then there'd be no case to answer. Making money out of poor people is what we call "business".

Besides, we expect companies and corporations to rip us off. To overcharge us. To pass off substandard goods if they can get away with it. To pay their chief executives more money than existed in all of ancient Rome and have BBC programmes endorsing the sale of cat food sandwiches as simply sound commercial sense.

We've all experienced that startled moment of horror when we've done something rash, such as catching a train at rush hour. Or using our phones abroad. Or buying a cup of tea at a motorway service station. (Unit price, what? Maybe 2p? Sale price? £2.75. I'm a rubbish capitalist and can't do the sums but isn't that something like about 20,000% profit?)

Morality is a tricky business in the marketplace, especially now. When companies can't pay their debts, they go bankrupt. Or ask the government for a bailout. American financial writer James Surowiecki points out that American Airlines went into administration not because it couldn't afford to pay its debts but that it'd be "foolish" of it to waste more money doing so. By contrast, millions of Americans whose homes are in negative equity would also be better off making "a strategic default". Yet they don't – it's considered bad form. Immoral. It's a double standard that he calls "obvious and offensive".

It's probably not a good idea to break the law and helping yourself to items from Tesco's deli counter isn't to be recommended. But when the chief operating officer sells his shares eight days before last week's profits warning, netting himself £200,000, isn't that a bit obvious and offensive too? The company has defended Bob Robbins's actions. Of course. But there are some who say pocketing £200,000 is a greater offence than taking a tub of reduced-for-quick-sale coleslaw. That Phil Clarke's multimillion pound bonus somewhat overshadows the price of a packet of cheese.

Congratulations, Tesco. Replacing check-outs with self-scanning tills and CCTV is a means of treating both your employees and your customers with contempt. What a brilliant coup! Remove all human contact, destroy jobs and imply potential criminality in all. Apart from your senior executives, who are simply acting "within the rules".

What do Antony Worrall Thompson and your 16% nosedive have in common? They're simply the logic of the market, coming back to bite you on the arse.